A Founder Member of the International Society for Respiratory Protection, I have always been a great enthusiast for the scientific work published by its members and the advances to safety such work has brought, over the years.

Amongst those advances may be included that singular improvement in Respiratory Protection, marked by the advent of Positive Pressure Breathing Apparatus, during the ‘Seventies.

And: in the early ‘Eighties, the coming of bench-mark test standards that was to improve, so much, the safety of Fire-fighters and others who use Self Contained Breathing Apparatus in hazardous atmospheres.

AGA Spiro (Interspiro) was the first company to make positive pressure RPD commercially available and, in my view, its essential design features have yet to be significantly improved by any subsequent designs.

The paper downloadable here, is abstracted from the first of the Society’s regular publications and describes the findings of engineers and scientists who worked tirelessly to advance the state of our art - Scientists such as Hans Almquist and Gunnar Dahlbeck; who showed conclusively the means to prevent mask in-leakages; so providing Protection Factors in excess of 100,000!

They went further; illustrating that the use of well designed, positive pressure BA would provide physiological advantages, too: for example, by improving the alveolar air distribution during effort and demonstrating the importance of low breathing resistances and minimising residual mask volumes.

Indeed; the work presented in this paper was to lead to several of the test protocol, today specified in International, test standards.
Examples are EN136, EN137, EN250 - in which, essential safety features of Respiratory protective devices are tested.

Society did not, as Orwell’s book suggested might be, burn its books and records during 1984. What our Society did was to consolidate thirty years’ worth of the most significant safety improvements ever seen for RPD used in these challenging environments. These improvements, originating from the work of one firm have since been universally demployed, to the benefit of fire-fighters, divers and industrial workers everywhere. 

In 1984 was created an international group of technicians whose common goal remains research for improving lung protection, scientifically measuring risks and disseminating the knowledge gained to the benefit of workers throughout the civilised world. 

WP